


Twist and Shout

by JennyBoBenny



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2019-10-27 06:52:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17761916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JennyBoBenny/pseuds/JennyBoBenny
Summary: Seamus and Dean as they grow up, with all the drama of being a gay kid in the 90s and living without a dad.





	1. First Year

“Thomas,” their coach called, and Dean ran up to collect his jersey. It was a dollar-store brand; made of cotton that stained his skin with its neon green dye. The team’s fingers, sticky from their cherry ice pops, were dotted with fuzz, and their backs-- which were sweaty from the Summer-- clung to their new shirts.  
Dean fixes his, trying to pull the hem down far enough to cover his waist, which is longer than the other boys. Sometimes they call him a beanstalk for it.  
One, whose skin is soft and pink like peaches, smiles at him. “Lucky jersey, mate,” he says, “Number nine.” There, on the front, it has been scribbled in sharpie, just under their team name: the Green Team. The ink bleeds into the material, so it cobwebs, and becomes blurred. “Since we’re nine years old, your jersey is lucky. I got a lousy twelve. That won’t be good for another three years, and there’s no way I’m playing football for another three years.” The boy is still smoothening his ice pop, pushing the melted flavor to the top, like you might do with toothpaste. His mouth is dyed red, and his eyes are bright blue, looking up at Dean like he expects something. When he finally walks away, he turns back curiously, but only for a second.  
It starts raining later. It always rains in England, so grass becomes slick, and the kids can wash the sugar off their hands in the parking-lot-puddles. Dean’s cleats were damp with it, and his skin was so cold it raised into goose eggs.  
Their game started when the thunder did, quiet enough that it only distracted the players, but the parents weren’t concerned. They were sitting in lawn chairs, and when Dean waved to his mum-- an umbrella in the crook of her armpit and a disposable camera protected under the hem of her blouse-- she shook her head “no.”  
A boy, who Dean knows from cookouts and block parties but does not remember the name of, has his hands cupped around his mouth like a megaphone. “Hey, Thomas!” It’s the same volume he used last week, when Dean had been sitting on the curb to draw, and the boy was trying to kick a ball around with his friends. “Sod off, you wanker,” he smiled around his pb&j, so his friends broke into hushed little giggles. That’s what the rain sounded, like, too. Whispering secrets during class, gossip, snickers covered with hands. It was so thick, that when the boy yelled for Dean to “Bloody do something,” his words were smothered by it.  
Dean stares at the peach boy, who is no longer smiling. Even he, who does not like football, is bent at the knees. His hair is pinned to his forehead by rain, and his mouth is also open. Probably to yell at Dean to move, to get the ball, but Dean only hears his mother’s voice. “I’m signing you up for football, Deanny. And I’m paying good money to do it. You need to make friends. You’ve got to promise me you’re gonna make friends.”  
The ball was coming at him, slow, like everything was floating — last summer, when his Aunt Kelly let them swim in her pool, he remembered feeling this way— he couldn’t hear; it was slow, white-noise, heavy but soft. When he pumped his legs, it was like he wasn’t moving. Just running in place, slowing down the harder he tried. He couldn’t breathe.  
Under him, the ball lands, sending rainwater onto the soles of his trainers; the edge of his kneecaps. In this great, chlorine-filled swimming pool, Dean kicks his leg just to float. Only this time, something acidic washes through him, rivers through his veins, running into each bone like watercolor. He feels the ball against the side of his foot, feels his energy crumple up through it, feels a rubber band inside of him stretch and release; sees it go flying.  
The goal is on the other side of the field. Dean pictures the ball collapsing into that net, but it goes farther. Over the parents lined up in lawn chairs, their feet rested on coolers; over the chain fence, past the first row of blooming Spring trees.  
Two years later, he gets a letter.  
The mail delivery boy— it was that boy, that mean boy, riding around on his blue bicycle— throws it at him, along with a newspaper and one of his mom’s gardening magazines. “Seems like you’ve got a secret admirer, Thomas,” he says, beginning to ride off. He looks back to finish, “They’re fancy, too.”  
Dean fumbles through the mail, leafing through his mother’s things until he reaches something he knows is different. An envelope, but not the thin, flimsy kind you can tear through. This is tough; it’s texture like the pores in skin, but gritty. The water color paper he’d been given last Christmas, or a cut that’s scabbed over. It’s the color of the coffee stains his Mum leaves on tables, except for the seal in the middle— a crayon-like, waxy circle-- which is a deep, burgundy red. Turning it over, Dean reads the address. First, his name, which he has never seen in such elegant scrawl before, nevermind printed on the back of a letter— as though he is an adult, who deserves to know things. Then, his home address, and finally, “The pretty room with all the paintings”.  
He unlatches the little wooden fence to their back garden, his fingers stumbling around it as his other hand prys at the seal. He doesn’t say anything to his mom, only stands there, waiting for her to hear him puttering around and turn away from the rosemary she’s tampering with. She has the stereo on, playing one of those 50s hits she likes. It sounds tinny coming from there; grating. Like it’s playing from the inside a drainage pipe.  
She hums along to it, whispering “do you believe in magic”, the toes of her boots digging into the ground. When she turns around to take a sip of her lemonade, she only lifts her eyebrows in surprise. “Deanny? What’ch’ya doing there, love?”  
He shifts, moving the rest of the mail so it’s tucked under his armpit, and hands her the letter. She reads the back, her eyebrows closing in together like knitting needles, the little wrinkle forming there a string of yarn. She takes off her thick gardening gloves and drops them in the grass next to her; slides the paper out gently. Dean stands with his legs crossed, nervously blinking, his lips pressing into his teeth.  
She breathes. Looks up, her irises like the rising moon, and the pores in her skin caught with sweat and light. “You’re a wizard.”  
The song playing from the stereo becomes suddenly clearer, as if it had rolled out onto open ground.

 

Steven O’Brien’s hair is a thick, curly stack. It is the color of a grocery-store orange, the kind that costs you a little extra because of how ripe it is. He haloes in the sun; gold in his fly-away strands, rings of light in his brown eyes. A lot of him exists that way, as though he was built by God to live in the outdoors. His hands are tough looking for an eleven year old’s: crusted around the edges and packed with dirt. His eyes bulge out of his head like a mosquito. That’s what Shay sees him as: a big, overgrown mosquito at the ear. His cheeks are red, and in this idea they’re like that from the blood he sucks out of you when he talks. But even though he has this annoying, buzzing quality, Seamus waits for him at the bus stop. It’s 2 p.m., when he normally returns from elementary school, stepping off that yellow bus Seamus has never gotten to see the innards of. “Why don’t you ever go to school, Seamus?” he says on their walk home, kicking a stone the size of a golf ball back and forth between them. The sky is cloudy and dark, but the sun creeps through in places, lighting up the world like a flashlight might do under the palm of your hand. Steven kicks the stone. It skips on the tar like it’s lake water and tumbles into a drain.  
Seamus feels his face go bright red, like that flashlight is in the inside of his brain, heating his whole face up. “Don’t know, Ste, why don’t you ever kick that stone within fifty feckin’ feet of me?”  
“Sorry, mate. Just curious is all. Y’know the kids at school think I’m lying about ye’. T’ink you’re my imaginary friend or some shite like tha’. It’s not fair. Why’s it that I have ta’ go t’school every day, and your parents let ye’ stay home? It ain’t right, mate.”  
“I told you. I go t’school. It’s just… y’know, private, like. Real elite. Ye’ve probably never heard of it,” Seamus shrugs. He always thought Steven was annoying and repetitive, like when a CD gets all scratched up; he keeps jumping from song to song, or looping over the same part again and again.  
His mam and da used to say the same thing about him. “Ye’ talk too much, Seamus. People don’t like it when ye’ talk too much. It drives em mad— it drives me mad, actually. Part of growing up is realizing that other people don’t want to hear your thoughts all the time. They don’t want ta’ hear what ye’ t’ink about every little thing. Now that’s enough.”  
Steven drops his backpack on the side of the curb and stalks into the woods. They live in South Eire, the rich side; one of those cornered off neighborhoods in an already small city. When his parents asked why he was so desperate not to go to an Irish Wizarding School, Seamus told them, “then I’d have ta’ keep living ‘ere. Ta’ only good the about Kenmare are the feckin’ Kestrals. I wish we lived in Dublin, like. Somewhere busier. More people. More ta’ do.”  
His da didn’t like that. He’s all about Irish pride. “Wha’, and ye’ t’ink yer’ gonna get more ah’ dat in England, d’you? Listen ‘ere: t’ere’s only one t’ing those Brits are good for and it’s goddamn yuppy accents. Hogwarts ‘r whatever t’fuck don’t got a goddamn thing on Eire.”  
Seamus looked to his mam, over his dad’s shoulder. She took a sip from her wine glass and shook her head.  
Hogwarts is a yuppy school. Public, sure, not like the one his parents plan on sending him off to, but nice. It has Dumbledore. Even has its own yippity, successful quidditch team. And if Seamus likes anything, it’s quidditch.  
Growing up in a muggle town just so your mom can lie about her identity for years means you have little to no time to enjoy being a wizard, aside from discovering that you can give wedgies to little arse holes just through sheer will, or that you can be the smallest yet the scariest boy around the block.  
Seamus didn’t know he was a wizard until he was five. Which, yeah, he supposes isn’t too shabby compared to the rotten deal muggleborns are handed. But still, being a kid and watching your dad have a mental breakdown in the middle of a family dinner is a pretty life changing experience.  
“You’re not a witch, you feckin’ crazy satanic cunt—“ is what he said before Seamus’ mam pulled out her wand and gave him a big tattoo of a lady’s No-No-Zone on his forehead. He dropped his fork and knife.  
She rolled up her sleeves, stood up from the table, and started panting, real heavy like. “Who’s the cunt now, huh?”  
Then of course, his dad started screaming, and then she started yelling back, even louder, like she had magicked an invisible megaphone— “Oh, yeah? That scare yer’ little Catholic heart, does it? Well guess feckin’ what— your son’s a fecking witch too! And I’ll be raisin’ him as one!”  
Seamus got his extensive vocabulary from his parents’ rows, which were shockingly less frequent now that they’re separated. They live in the same house, of course; divorce is a sin, a sin against God. Seamus can’t really make sense of that, seeing as they were wizards n’ all anyhow, but his mam says: “Just cause we were born witches don’t mean we have ta’ be sinners, now does it? Yer’ da and I don’t love each other anymore, but that doesn’t mean we revoke t’promise we made to t’Lord.”  
Cursing is also a sin, then. Swearing means soap in your mouth, or a rotten smack on the shoulder, or cleaning up even though Seamus’ mam knows perfectly well she can do it ten times faster.  
“But ye’ swear all’t feckin’ time,” Seamus said, his hair wet from running through the sprinklers, Ste sprawled out in the grass behind him. They were seven, and his mam had just had another fight with his da, this one so loud they could hear it under the spray.  
“When you get middle aged and have a runty, devilish boy and a good-for-nothing man following ye’ around, ye’ tell me how easy it is not t’feckin’ swear— now shut yer’ mouth before I make ye’ say that in front of yer’ grandmo’ter, how’s that sound?”  
She gave him a hard pat on his cheek, one that made his raw skin turn white under her palm. As she turned to go to her car, he kicked into the dirt and tried to yell. He couldn’t. He swallowed his voice and looked down to his shoes, at first shyly, then in horror. The toes of his new sneakers were lit up in a fire as orange as Ste’s hair, heating up his feet and blackening the rubber. He felt pieces of them pop like popcorn, burn his shins and knees, rest ash on his skin so it blended in with all the freckles there. He fell back on his arse, screaming and yelling, kicking his feet into the grass. Ste ran over to help him, but before he could get a word out, his mom had extinguished the flames with nothing but her eyes. She shook her head at Seamus. He fell back into the grass and didn’t talk the rest of the evening.


	2. First Year, Pt 2

“Ste,” Seamus says, now, his hands tucked into his jean pockets. “I’ve got t’tell yeh somet’in’.”  
Steven was already heading down the hill into the belly of the woods, his pudgy red fingers catching branches so he wouldn’t slip and fall.  
“Well tell me, t’en,” he says passively, from the bottom of the hill. His face is blotched pink and yellow, his mouth hung open to breathe steady.  
“Ye’ see, I’m moving for a while. New private school, only, it’s in England. And it’s sleepaway, y’know. Like summer camp but year-round.”  
Ste was wiping his palms on his track pants, and scanning over the ground. Like he was checking for something, Only Seamus knew that this was just what he had to do with himself when he thought hard. Real hard, like a tea kettle boiling over, so it squeaked and burnt itself up all over. He didn’t say anything, so Seamus kept going. “It ain’t a bad school. Ye’ can tell yer’ fecking friends t’at much. I’ll send photos, t’ey’ll all be fecking jealous, mate.”  
“Right, yeah,” Ste said. He didn’t ask when Seamus would be leaving, so Seamus didn’t tell him. At the end of August he used the duffel bag Ste left over his house their last sleepover to pack his things. Pajamas, tighty whities, good trainers, socks, wand, a Kenmare Kestrels issue of Quidditch Weekly, muggle-brand mint gum from the corner store, a notepad to write letters to Ste (“No phones. T’ey don’t even allow technology. I mean, it’s a good school n’all, but I’m tellin’ ye’, it’s not like yer missing out on anyt’ing, mate”), and a photograph of his mam.

Dean had a private countdown, one that clicked in his head like a clock, for the end of break. He played football with his mates in the backyard. Felt it thump with him, in his ears, when he looked at their faces.  
He imagined how the people would be when he got there. If they would have the same cut and dry lines, still and flat and scratchy, their eyes always flouncing around the room but never on you. His mates are nice blokes. They eat their sandwiches looking down, and when they talk to each other they hold their hands over their mouths. Dean thinks that they like each other. Sometimes he sees them in pairs between classes, talking, so their whole mouths show in crooked teeth and curling lips.  
When they were all together, like this, like school lunches and hanging out til their mums called them home, they’d speak about teachers, and what they saw on the telly. They spoke subconsciously quieter the later it got, tossing words back and forth with the ball, their hands in loose fists, mouths resting open.  
The night turned the grass fluorescent, so that when they brought out a lantern, it felt like they were fireflies. Buzzing with this silent energy, the kind that existed here. Hands grabbing shoulders, knees knocking in a fight for the ball; nearly slipping but not quite. Dean wondered if it’d be the same, there. Or if it’d be the same feeling as that acidic twinge under his skin, the one he had to bite back for fear of it releasing. If it’d be sharp and burning: falling on concrete or touching the stove when it’s hot.  
The sweat on their necks felt cool when it was hit by the breeze, and the game ended with them patting his back and getting on their bikes. They waved goodbye, longer, now, like this sort of acknowledgement that they wouldn’t see him for a while. He’d told them that he’d gotten in contact with his dad and would be moving there. He’d come back for summers. It made him feel sort of guilty-- not for them, but for his mum. That she’d have to talk to the neighbors like she was okay with it. Like his dad was a good guy, and she was happy to let Dean stay with him. But he couldn’t help wondering about what the kids would say. He supposed that it didn’t matter; that just to have his name in their mouths, so it spread and was known, would be a good thing. He fantasized about it on the train. Girls whispering in each others ears, “y’know that Thomas? No, not that Thomas-- Dean Thomas, the cute one-- I heard he’s off visiting his dad. Who knows how handsome he’ll get this year. Maybe he’ll come back even taller. And fitter, too.”  
It was already seeming farther and farther off. Like that was the dream, and this was reality. Him, here, on this train, so he kept going forever. The seats were green and frayed like ones he’d been on before— trips to museums and family get-togethers— only the compartment wasn’t covered in metal bits and pieces, it was wood and warm. When he held onto the window ledge, it wasn’t because he was afraid of all that space outside the window, but because he wanted to feel the little designs that had been carved there with his hands. Around the pictures of wizards, Horses, and trees, were names. Drawn into the mahogany, so that they felt scratchy on his skin. He thought about etching his own name there, so it would become real. Him and this world, intertwined somehow. He took the quill he’d bought in Diagonal Ally and scratched out a drawing, wiry and pale.  
The door opened and closed behind him, and he stopped.  
“You’re feckin’ vandalizing school property, aren’t yeh?”  
Dean turned to face the boy. The first thing he saw was the freckles, crawling everywhere. They splayed out from his smile, too, which was crooked and boyish. He was missing some teeth, his tongue poking through the gaps like a dog panting for air. His hair was damp with sweat and curly, so frizzy from humidity that it was pulled up out of his face.  
“Don’ worry,” the boy said, taking out his things and sitting beside Dean. “Won’ tell anyone— that is,” he looked side long at Dean, who was still placid, his mouth hung barely open, “that is you feckin’ draw me as well.”  
His face, which had been grave, had broken out into another smile, this one like a bark, so it scraped and tore.  
Dean didn’t say anything, only turned to the paneling, and added another face next to his own. He pressed the end of the quill in sharp for the freckles, like he was stabbing them into the face, so they rested like marks on a dart board. When he was done, the boy put his hand over it. It was pink and patchy, his nails bitten into stubs, tracing over their two faces drawn there. “Yer’ a good draw-er, mate,” he said, and so Dean cringed.  
“It’s not draw-er,” he said.  
“Wha’d’yeh mean it’s not draw-er? It’s a compliment, mate.”  
“I mean that’s not a word, ‘Draw-er’. It’s ‘artist’.”  
“Right,” he smiles, “yeh’ really t’ink highly of yourself, I see. That’s nice, that is.” Dean went to argue, but the boy continued, “no, really. You should be real proud of yer’self, shouldn’t yeh? I mean really, not many people can have t’at kind of confidence. An ‘artist’ at eleven. T’ats a real talent. Ye’ could be on Wizard’s Weekly for t’at, couldn’t yeh?”  
Dean smiled a little, so it poked at the corners of his mouth. He almost didn’t want to, wanted to ignore his teasing, but it was funny, wasn’t it? And his mouth opened like how paper-cover books spread even after you’ve pressed them closed. He looked down, shook the laugh off. “Oh, shut up.”  
The boy crossed in front of him, the waistband of his neon green boxers showing purposefully under his khaki pants. Dean knew other boys like this. Ones that were bony, feminine, so that their faces were smooth from fat and their bodies were small. They sometimes had to hide it in wife-beaters, unlaced trainers, and funny gestures. Scratching their chins, cracking their knuckles, sitting with their legs apart.  
“M’name’s Seamus Finnegan,” the boy said. He was sitting with one arm splayed over the back of the bench; like Dean saw older, bigger men do at the cinema.  
“Dean Thomas.”  
Seamus smiled, and so Dean did too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave comments so I feel motivated enough to write more u_u would be greatly appreciated


	3. First Year, Part 3

The school was this big, breathing thing— sitting on a hill above the lake, its spine crooked, it’s sides grown over with vines and moss. In the inky, deep-black of the night, Dean saw its negative spaces. He’d been taught in his art class to see not the object, but how the background created it’s silhouette. He saw the divets in blue-black bruise of a sky, the ones that built towers and arches. And the bridge, cutting over the lake they were on, made itself from the water. A smooth arch holding its flatness steady.  
It was strange, then, to feel the realness around him. These were things he recognized: The way Seamus’ body curved over the edge of the boat so his hand could dip into his reflection, and his red forehead transitioning into sweaty, sandy-blonde curls; students in circles of laughter, only the highlights of their eyes and teeth visible in the dark; the hollow, empty sound of kids’ trainers rapping over wood. He could transport these things back to home, into the grey of England, and the rainy blue of his boxed-off town. But when they got off the boats, so they squished into mud and slid past mucked water, Dean knew the difference.  
The groundskeeper rose. He was taller than blokes like Dean, than school teachers who knew too much, than the men on TV his mum called “handsome.” In his fist, pink and white, he was holding a lantern. Not a modern one, with a fluorescent light bulb that turned the world white, but the proper old-fashioned kind. It was wiry black and lit with a flame, so the students faces existed in orange slices of light and shadow.  
“A’right, gather ‘round,” he said. His voice was gruff and deep, the kind of scratchy and mean quality you heard from soccer coaches and TV villains. But he said this with a smile, tucked away politely under his scraggly beard. His cheeks were pink with it, and his eyes were like a dog’s; black and beady, but kind. “I’ll give yuh a good ol’ tour of the castle ‘ere, n’den I’ll take yuh to the feast. How’s that sound?”  
He pressed softly against the door, pushing it open so it scraped past nature and over stone.  
Dean knew more differences as they continued through corridors and were led through passages. There was a distinction between white, boxed buildings-- tile floors, blackboards, pale green lockers-- and this. This was another world, one that his home was entering unsurely into. Seamus, his little ankles peeking out between rolled socks and hanging robe, were guests here. Dean’s hands, deep brown and calloused from drawing, were visitors. Aliens to the gold interior, the vastness, the staircases that moved themselves and the oil paintings that came alive. He watched brushstrokes change, repositioning themselves; pulling and stretching like skin and muscle. He was surprised that it did not feel even stranger. Surprised that if he wanted to, if he was so far-removed from his old world that he didn’t think an adult would yell sourly at him, he could touch these shifting brushstrokes and feel the magic there.  
Seamus put his hand hard on Deans shoulder, pulled down at it so Dean sunk to his level. His voice quieted, “ye’ wanna do a thumb war, den?”  
“What about Hagrid?”  
“He’s just goin’ on ‘bout t’ese rubbish paintings, I mean who gives a feck.”  
“They move.”  
“Well of course t’ey move--” Seamus clapped a hand over his mouth melodramatically. “Ye’ mean yer’ a mud— I mean yer’ a muggleborn? I had no idea, really I didn’t— I mean well done, n’ all t’at. Usually kids are quite, well,” he shook his hands aggressively in explanation, “y’know what I mean?”  
“Right.”  
“I don’ mean it to be offensive, but it’s true, innit? I mean ye’ always hear about muggleborns being all excited by it, is all.” Dean nodded, and so Seamus still looked unsure. “I haven’t offended ye’, have I? Cause I really haven’t got a problem wit’ muggleborns, not at all--”  
“No, you haven’t,” Dean said. His mouth was dry and his tongue felt too large, like it was something that didn’t belong there. His mum always told him he was too quiet; nudged him during family gatherings, scolded him when he came home too early. She said, “You should be out making friends, Deanny. You’re always hiding. It’s not right. It’s just not.”  
Dean didn’t open his mouth the rest of the tour. Seamus was talking with the other students in hushed, giggly, school-children voices. His smile was biting, and his cheeks turned pink with it. Not from embarrassment, but from excitement. He stuttered with laughter, and his glance would scatter throughout the room, swarming like bees, catching itself on faces and voices.  
They stopped outside the “Great Hall”, waiting there behind the massive, arched doors. It felt overdramatic, like an entry that should’ve been preceded by a moat. It didn’t match the yelling and screaming from students, or the way they were playing with their robes; draping them around their bodies to create outfits and hairdos.  
“Dean,” Seamus said, turning. He had a smile on his face like a cut, all jagged and raw, and his eyes were squinted with laughter. “Ye’ve gotta hear t’is, mate,” he said, and he reached over to the boy behind him, pulling him forward. “Go on-- oh, t’is is Neville, Dean-- Neville, go on--”  
“H-Have,” Neville started, looking unsurely between Seamus and Dean, “Have you seen my toad--”  
Seamus started laughing then, hiccuping from lack of breath, and so Dean felt himself smile; heard his lips part to show teeth, sticky and happy, and he bit his tongue to keep himself from giggling.  
A girl turned around to shush them, and so they both started laughing harder, and Dean couldn’t bite his tongue hard enough to stop it this time.  
The Great Hall was set up like his cafeteria back home. Long columns of tables, strict in their uniformity, and students busy with it. Hands banging and slapping together, their shoes squeaking, teeth exposed, mouths open. The students were flushed and angry under their wizard caps and robes. They turned to look at the first years, who were busy memorizing the room: golden and scarlet with candlelight; there were maybe a thousand up there, hovering above them, so they dipped and rose up again like bodies in a lake. Then there was the ceiling, which moved and breathed like the real sky. Only it wasn’t, because this showed a fantastical daytime, in which the atmosphere was baby blue and the clouds were colored in pinks and oranges, like a renaissance painting that had come alive. There were students building contrastly black walls with their uniforms, their backs facing the isle, their faces over the smooth wood tables.  
The new students got closer together— so the heat built and their breaths became stuffy— as they reached the front of the hall. Seamus stuck to Dean’s side, jabbering, but Dean hadn’t been listening. He could only hear glass clinking, crescendoed voices fighting and sparking together, the heavy slab of hands and feet against tables and floors.  
They were approaching the raised platform at the front of the room. It reminded Dean of his assemblies back at school, except they’d be watching magicians, or listening to speeches. Instead, they were staring at a podium, a long table of eccentric and cross-looking professors, and a very old man. It was Albus Dumbledore. Seamus had gotten a chocolate frog on the train, and under its belly was a holographic card of the man’s face. He had looked a bit sour in his photo, but his real face was gentle. Dainty, really. He had a little smile on beneath his beard, and his eyes were squinted, as though he was staring into the sun. The room settled when he clapped, small and quiet. Dean recognized it from when his friends’ dads watched golf on the telly, with their arms resting over the backs of sofa chairs. He thought it was a little funny, how rough the men looked with their beers in their fists, staring at a quiet television screen.  
Professor Dumbledore’s voice was like steam from a kettle. Whistling up into the air, expanding outward, curling like smoke.  
Seamus cut crescent moons into his palms. He was sweating, and he could feel his clothes stick damp to his skin. But Dean didn’t look nervous. His expression was flat and dry like paper. It took awhile for Seamus to learn to stop flickering back and forth between Dean’s blank expression, the students and their quivering forms, and his own hands. They were dry at the knuckles, stingy and bleeding, and his palms were damp. All of him was damp, actually; he was sweating, and he knew he was red all over. He knew the hairs on his neck were curling with it and becoming golden wisps.  
“Wh’ house d’ya t’ink you’re gonna be in?” Seamus asked. He knew that Dean would be able to see the perspiration, resting like raindrops, along his skin. It was hot in here, too hot, and Seamus was unsteady from it. His neck was craned just to get closer to Dean’s ears, and his whole body shifted— shivering like when you get in the shower too fast, and the cold hurts.  
Dean’s mouth opened, just barely, and his eyes filtered between Seamus and the ceremony. Then he shrugged.  
“I reckon you’ll be in Ravenclaw,” Seamus said, “not me, though. ‘M too stupid for Ravenclaw. Prob’ly be in Gryffindor.”  
Dean nodded, and so Seamus stopped talking, and pressed more crescents into his skin. Ste’s sister used to call them that. And she’d trace them in with pen, so they looked sharp there, and so his freckles became chocolate-milk colored stars around it. “I don’t mind Gryffindor so much, though,” Seamus continued. “All te’ best are from there, I t’ink. I mean that’s what you always hear, isn’t it?”  
Dean didn’t answer.  
“Oh, that’s right, I’m sorry I keep forgetting you’re a mud— a muggleborn,” Seamus said. One of the professors shushed him so he started whispering, quiet but aggressive. “I promise I won’t do it again, mate. Honest. Me da’ gets right pissed when me mam calls him a muggle. Not t’at being a muggle— or related to muggles— is an insult. I lived in a muggle neighborhood all my life, I did. ‘M just saying—“  
“Finnegan!”  
Seamus wiped his palms on his pants and feigned cracking his knuckles by pressing them in with his palms.  
You’re a little small, aren’t you?, was the first thing he heard under the brim of the cap. The second and final thing he heard was “Gryffindor.”  
Everything turned static-silent, and Seamus felt his body move. Flitting through the world like paper edges, and crumpled up pieces of parchment. There were people smiling and clapping, so their heat burned him up and he sparked with it. Let himself catch on fire.  
Seamus could always feel himself smile. Feel it take over his face and stretch into his body. In photographs, it’s all he can see. His teeth, a little crooked and ugly, biting over his tongue in a smile. And it was happening now. It went up to his eyes, so they became crooked and ugly too, but he liked it.  
Dean was one of the last to be called. Seamus thought he looked cool as he got up there; his legs long and spindly; a daddy long legs you might find in the back corners of porches and patios. He looked older than eleven. Even his face was more mature. It took-on the kind of expressions dads sometimes make when they get angry. The kinds that look like holding-it-all-in. Biting the insides of their cheeks; a focused divet between their eyebrows.  
Ultimately, Dean gets put in Gryffindor. Seamus isn’t surprised; Dean looks like a Gryffindor, actually, when he really thinks about it. That ridge where the wrist meets the bone of the thumb forms a perfectly sharp and square angle, and his shoes have been stained by grass and dirt. Seamus waved him over, and so Dean takes the space opposite him.  
“Yeh’ wanna split t’is piece of cornbread wit’ me?” Seamus asked, his fingers already tearing it into two crumbling pieces. “S’real good, mate.”  
Dean took half.

While they took their bags up to their dorm, Seamus told Dean about Harry Potter. Quietly, though. Under his breath, so the boy himself wouldn’t hear his excited whispers. Occasionally, during pauses in the story, the boys would steal glances at the back of Harry’s head. Dean thought it was funny how small Harry was; even smaller than Seamus. Hollowed out, gaunt, and runty. He didn’t look like a hero, he looked the way some kids in his school looked. The kids that were held in even lower regard than Dean. His glasses were held together with cellar tape, and his hair was matted in the back from sleep.  
“All m’sayin’ is: be proud t’be in this house”, Seamus finished.  
Dean was proud. He felt, looming over some of the other boys, that he might have a place here. It might even be a good place.

**Author's Note:**

> Anyways I’d like to write more, I have it all planned and some of second and third year written :) Please comment because without motivation: I am a lazy turd
> 
> I have another unfinished Deamus work but I’m way more excited about this, plus that one was (mildly) a joke
> 
> Also if you want a friend and like Deamus!!! HMU!!! Like Dean I have abandonment issues and am very alone uwu
> 
> Also also, I do acknowledge that the Irish accent is extremely over the top, so let me know if you hate it. Personally, as a half-Irishman and a lover of Seamus, I enjoy it and think it’s funny! And I think it adds to his voice! But I can see how it may be... An issue.
> 
> Okay that’s all, kisses


End file.
